Contents

Early life[edit]

Bisset was born Winifred Jacqueline Fraser Bisset[2] in Weybridge, Surrey, England, the daughter of Arlette Alexander, a lawyer turned housewife, and Max Fraser Bisset, a general practitioner.[3] She was brought up in Tilehurst. Her father was Scottish and her mother was of French and English descent;[4][5] Bisset's mother cycled from Paris and boarded a British troop transport to escape the Germans during World War II.[6] Bisset has a brother, Max. Her mother taught her to speak French fluently, and she was educated at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London. She had taken ballet lessons as a child and began taking acting lessons and fashion modelling to pay for them. When Bisset was a teenager, her mother was diagnosed with disseminating sclerosis.[7]

Bisset's parents divorced in 1968, after 28 years of marriage.[6] Her father died aged 71 of a brain tumour in 1982. Her mother died in 1999.[8]

In 1977, Bisset made strides towards becoming a better-known entertainer in America with her movie The Deep, where swimming underwater wearing only a T-shirt for a top, helped make the film a box office success, leading the producer Peter Guber to say, "That T-shirt made me a rich man,"[9] and led many to credit her with popularising the wet T-shirt contest. At the time, Newsweek declared her "the most beautiful film actress of all time." About that time, a small Dutch-produced film Bisset had made some years earlier was re-released in the United States under the title Secrets. That movie featured the only extensive nude scenes of Bisset's career and the producers cashed in on her fame.

Personal life[edit]

Bisset has never married, though she has had lengthy romances with actor Michael Sarrazin,[13] Russian-American dancer and actor Alexander Godunov,[1] real estate magnate Victor Drai,[1] actor Vincent Pérez,[14] and martial arts instructor Emin Boztepe.[15] "I feel like I was married to them because I was very dedicated to them", she said in a 2008 interview. "But I also used to feel claustrophobic. Like many people who don't easily commit, I think I had a fear of being known; I was not sure there was anybody inside there."[16]